


Come Away, O Human Child

by thatdamnuchiha



Series: Prophet [1]
Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Body Dysphoria, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Fluff, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Modern Girl in Middle Earth, Mystery, Not Canon Compliant, POV Third Person, Prophecy, Prophetic Dreams, Prophetic Visions, Prophets, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Slow To Update, Third Age
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:20:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28253799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatdamnuchiha/pseuds/thatdamnuchiha
Summary: She didn’t want to be there – no one in their right mind would – but that hardly changed the fact she had unwittingly stumbled into the world of one of her beloved storybooks.Or was it?She knows the history of that world as it is meant to be, but some facts simply don’t line up, and one Rose McCarthy is forced to adapt to a strange new life, as well as the fact that she might not be able to get home – ever. Because there’s a reason she’s there, stuck in a world which is neither as forgiving or as kind as the one she’s used to.No one ever said being a Prophet was easy.
Relationships: Glorfindel (Tolkien)/Original Female Character(s), Original Female Character(s) & Original Male Character(s)
Series: Prophet [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2069709
Comments: 5
Kudos: 77





	1. Prologue | On Distant Shores

**Author's Note:**

> Brought to you at 3am by writer's block on my other works, and that sweet non-existent impulse control I have... because lockdown is taking a toll. Hope you're all OK wherever y'all are, and hope you have a happy, safe christmas or whatever it is you might celebrate (because let's be honest we all need something to celebrate in these times).
> 
> This work FYI is probably going to have sloooow updates.

Salt blew in on the strong breeze, waves crashing upon the rocks a matter of metres below where they sat on the edge of the little cliffdrop. Silvery white hair battered about, played with by the winds almost lovingly, as she swung her legs back and forth, feeling the light mist of the sea lick at her legs then. Dark strands, a deep brown, not quite black, mingled with them, the familiar figure sitting so very close by as they greeted the sun’s rise together as they had for a long time.

“I do not see why they do not send you back,” he murmured, silvery grey eyes watching so very intently as she played with a silver flower which almost matched her hair colouring so. “When your little sister is causing such havoc…”

A wry smile pulled at her lips. “My, love, you make it sound as though you wish to be rid of me…” she said, laughing at the affronted expression which soon appeared on her beloved’s face. “Relax,” she whispered, tapping his nose as she found herself pulled into his lap. “I only tease, love. One would think you would be so used to such things by now…”

“Indeed,” he replied, smiling then, a thing so beautiful and brilliant it made her fall more deeply in love with him yet again. “I should be.”

“Besides,” she spoke then, eyes becoming distant and sorrowful as she stared at the expanse of sea between her and those others she held dear in her heart. “My time upon those other shores has come to a close – there is but a prophet for one age each, and as you know, my age has long passed.”

“But your sister—”

She smiled wryly, hope glinting in her gaze, a cherished promise waiting in her golden eyes as she met those silvery grey ones. “Ah, that problem, my love, falls to my yet youngest sibling who I one day hope to meet,” she said, white teeth glinting in the light of the sun as she grinned so very widely.

“So it has come so soon…” he mumbled, fingers intertwining with her own as he looked down at her then. “Do you think she too will fall under shade and bring naught but sorrow?”

“No.” She shook her head then, golden eyes twinkling. “I have Seen her, darling, and her future stirs like a warrior called to arms, inevitably answered and dutifully followed. Her fate crashes upon the shore like a tidal wave, her destiny ever surging towards a single winding path. She will know sorrow, and she will know pain, but she will rise above them like a seabird caught on an inexplicable, surging wind.” Silvery hair fell before her face then, glowing ever so softly with its own light, golden eyes almost shining from where they were set within her eerily perfect face. Not a blemish, nor imperfection could be seen. Unearthly, she would have been called on other shores, but she no longer resided there. Rather she was there with her beloved, and yet still caught up on the tides of her visions of a place she had long since left behind. “I have Seen her, and her path, and know this – she is beautiful.”


	2. Part One | The Village | Chapter I: A Girl Displaced

Had anyone told her four short years ago that she – plain jane Rose McCarthy – would wind up punted into a strange, bizarre, and oddly backwards village in a different world where no one spoke her language, then she would quite happily have called them insane.

It wasn’t like in those books where she died and was, for some strange reason, reborn in a new world with her memories intact and the like. Rather, she had just been walking home from another day in the office, and then the world had _flickered._ Like the static when changing TV stations, she might be tempted to describe it as, but either way she went from being in the middle of the pavement to being in the middle of a forest with nothing but the clothes on her back.

She had acquired the head wound – which had invariably given her something of an excuse for seeming so delirious and somewhat mad – after her subsequent _trip_ to that strange place. Only it was a one-way trip, or so it seemed, not that she had given up on trying to figure a way back. The main problem was that she didn’t know _how_ she had ended up there in the first place. It wasn’t like she had been summoned to become a hero or anything so ridiculous as that, nor had there been some strange mysterious object passed down through the family, nor a curious ring found in a pawn shop. She had just been walking, and then she had been in the middle of the wilds. The disparity was alarming, maddening, and confusing beyond belief.

“Girl!” the gruff voice of her caretaker came then, and Rose pulled herself out of her thoughts as she hurried out of her room – a rickety thing which was a far cry from the modern rooms she was so used to. She had learnt so very quickly to get over her fear of spiders. _No one there was going to help her as she was so used to._ That was one of the facts she had come to terms with very quickly.

“How… can I help you?” she asked, words still sounding so very stilted – but given she had to learn an entire new language from scratch in four years… Rose didn’t think she was doing so badly. Rather, it was something she had to cling to. Long ago, before the world had flickered around her, she had learnt it best to cling to the happy things in life. Reminders of how the world could be so very beautiful. _Because where there was beauty, there was also ugliness, and to get stuck up on the ugliness often turned one cold and cynical._ One couldn’t quite exist without the other, and so Rose had decided to think of the positives whenever she could. Not that she always could – indeed, in her first year or so, she hadn’t been able to think of a single thing, bone terrified and confused as she was.

Life, as she had so swiftly learnt, was like a packet of those every flavour beans from one of her favourite storybooks. There were good flavours and bad flavours, and like it or not, she couldn’t change the flavour of the one she had swallowed, good or bad as it tasted. Fate – destiny – whatever anyone called it had shoved her from her nice, quiet, ordinary life into some shitshow, and now she had to fucking _deal with it._ That was all she could do. All she knew how to do. Every sense in her body screamed at her to keep her mouth shut about her weird and wacky circumstances. _Though maybe the fact that they looked like they might be superstitious people who believed in witchcraft might have played a part in keeping her silence._ And so she had kept silent on her whole _the stars are different_ spiel and run along as best she could with the story the villagers had inferred.

She was no longer Rose McCarthy. She was just Rose there – a girl who was attacked by bandits on the road and had miraculously made it safely to the village called Riverby. A simple name for a simple village by the side of the Hoarwell River. Just as her name was simple enough, and blended well enough in with those in the village – bar one, that was. She kept her surname to herself – because in whatever backwards country she had landed in, surnames were only common amongst the nobility when given by their king.

“The water tank is empty,” he said, in that tone Rose had come to learn was his usual voice. She couldn’t count the number of times she had flinched in those first few years whenever the gruff man had spoken to her, thinking he was angry. Nothing good ever happened when anyone was angry.

Rose nodded, knowing by now she had to help out. Seregon, as he was named, had been injured – something which had happened long before she had appeared there, and as such, she had to pull her weight. Given she had been someone who wasn’t used to hard labour… It was safe to say she had been miserable there for her first couple of years as the skin of her hands hardened and cracked, sometimes bleeding when winter came until Daisy – the blacksmith’s wife – had taken pity on her sniffles and tears and shown her a salve to soothe her chaffed skin somewhat when those biting cold months came around. “Is the buckets—?”

“ _Are_ the buckets,” Seregon corrected, and Rose blushed. It was so very embarrassing to fumble her words _like a child._ Rose wasn’t a child. She hadn’t been one in a long while, despite… She closed her eyes, shaking her head.

“Are the buckets in the lean-to still?” she asked, tilting her head in question, leaving in the next breath as Seregon nodded sharply, peering at the letter set before him. Part of her wondered what they said – but her writing lessons were still going on, as were those _other_ languages, because _yes_ there was more than one godforsaken new language in that strange place. Seregon had, at some point between taking her in and then, decided she was to be his successor of sorts. Had she been male, she likely would have come under the care of one of the farming families who lacked sons for one reason or the other, but she was female through and through – thus hard labour was not for her. Though admittedly, she still considered heading to the river and carrying up buckets and buckets of water to fill the basic water tank there as _hard labour,_ but that was probably because she was a soft girl who had worked in an office and had a home full of conveniences which that place lacked.

She had actual muscles now, rather than the soft squishiness she had known for years upon years. Muscle didn’t build easily for her, but apparently the answer as to getting muscles and keeping them had been as simple as being punted into another world without so much as a flicker of indication. _Or maybe it was because—_

Rose shook her head, gathering up both buckets – because she could actually carry one in each hand by that point. That had to be something good about being punted into that place by – Rose was presuming – some higher power. It certainly made more sense than thinking she had ended up there through her own power. Or maybe the universes had converged or something mad like that and she had been unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She couldn’t quite think up any logical explanation for tripping into another world, other than the work of higher powers compared to herself. But that was a scary thought in itself. Rose wasn’t particularly fine with being some plaything of those with greater amounts of power than her own measly self.

The rushing sounds of waters made her close her eyes and push those thoughts away, locked behind that mask she wore. The mask which made people think she was fine, when really her thoughts were racing a mile a minute about why and what the fuck she was still doing there. Everyone wore masks, and Rose’s had only further adapted to her weird and wonderful situation. She hardly wanted to be thought of as unordinary. Not that it was easy…

Sighing, she crouched over the rippling surface, the shadows and light around her allowing her to glimpse her reflection in a particularly clear and slow, smoothly flowing section. She had looked twenty-something in her original world, but there, upon entry to that world, she had looked like a girl scarcely out of puberty. If there had been bars in that new, strange place, she wouldn’t have been let near them with a ten-foot pole. She didn’t understand it. Every time she saw her reflection in anything, the reflection looking back at her was anything but familiar.

She had been an average girl before – dark hair and dark eyes, plain and simple as they came. There had been two scars on her face from where she’d had chickenpox when she was only a little girl; a marking just below the right side of her lip, and the other above her left eyebrow. Before she had thought them as detracting from her appearance, but makeup had covered them up just fine. There had been other blemishes too, her skin tone not wholly even, but that had been fine. She hadn’t been ugly, but then again she hadn’t been a drop-dead beauty.

Those scars and markings were all gone.

Perhaps, had she been more conscientious about her appearance and looking her best, then she would have been glad – in that world without makeup and other such luxuries – that those sorts of things had vanished… but she didn’t. She hated looking at her appearance then, with her eerily unblemished skin without a single mark upon it, with her eyes and brows which had warped into something which, had she been in her old world, would have been described as _celestial_. Her features looked delicate in ways they had never before – unearthly, and foreign as the lands around her were. Even the folk there thought her appearance strange, proving it was no change to make her better fit in with her apparent new lands.

She wanted to go back home. She wanted her proper face and body back. But Rose had a rather foreboding inkling she wouldn’t get her wish.

But she didn’t dwell too long on such thoughts, because she had a job to do, and she rather wanted to get it done before the skies turned dark as they were wont to do when the evenings came upon them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's to hoping I can get the length of these chapters up.
> 
> Thanks for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> SPORADIC UPDATES T_T


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